President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly stressed that Iran’s naval forces are at the bottom of the ocean. Those claims were backed by Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that more than 90% of Iran’s regular navy had been destroyed. But Iran’s takeover of two merchant ships on Wednesday night using speedboats shows that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still poses a real threat in the Strait of Hormuz.
Experts, including Professor Saeid Golkar, say the Revolutionary Guards’ navy operates as a maritime guerrilla force focused on asymmetric warfare and hit-and-run tactics rather than on conventional naval battles involving large warships.
According to US intelligence sources who spoke to CNN, the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps retained about 50% of the assets it had before the war. Caine confirmed that about half of the organization’s fast attack boats had been destroyed, but the rest, whose numbers are difficult to estimate and range from hundreds to thousands, are operating as a “shadow army.” These are small, nimble vessels that are hard to detect by satellite, moor inside deep caves carved into the rocky coastline and are ready for action within minutes.
“The IRGC’s navy operates more like a guerrilla force at sea,” Golkar, an expert on the Revolutionary Guards, said. “It focuses on asymmetric warfare and hit-and-run tactics instead of classic naval battles.”
These boats carry anti-tank missiles and fighters armed with shoulder-fired missiles against aerial and maritime targets, and they can also be used to lay mines. While they are no match for a single US destroyer, deploying them in swarms of dozens, combined with drones or shore-based missiles, could inflict heavy damage on military and commercial vessels alike.
This tactic is not new. The Revolutionary Guards have operated this way since the 1980s, and in 2015 they even destroyed a mock-up of the aircraft carrier Nimitz using 100 speedboats in a highly publicized exercise.
According to the International Maritime Organization, the UN shipping agency, at least 20 vessels were attacked during the war, most of them by drones launched from mobile launchers on land that leave only faint traces behind. Retired Adm. Gary Roughead summed up the situation by saying it is a “disruptive force” whose intentions always remain ambiguous, allowing Iran to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed because of shipowners’ fears, even without large warships.
